Look Back in Anger Characters | GradeSaver Buy Study Guide Jimmy Porter Jimmy Porter is the play's main character. He is the "Angry Young Man" who expresses his frustration for the lack of feelings in his placid domestic life. Jimmy can be understood as both a hero for his unfiltered expressions of emotion and frustration in a culture that propagated unemotional resignation. He can also be considered a villain for the ways in which his anger proves to be destructive to those in his life. Cliff Lewis Cliff is a friend to both Jimmy and Alison. Cliff lives with them in their attic apartment. He is a working class Welsh man and Jimmy makes sure to often point out that he is "common" and uneducated. Cliff believes this is the reason that Jimmy keeps him as a friend. He is quite fond of Alison and they have a strange physically affectionate relationship throughout the play. Alison Porter Alison Porter is Jimmy's wife. She comes from Britain's upper class, but married into Jimmy's working class lifestyle. The audience learns in the first act that she is pregnant with Jimmy's child. Jimmy's destructive anger causes her great strain and she eventually leaves him.

Her child miscarries and she comes back to Jimmy to show him that she has undergone great suffering. Helena Charles Helena Charles is Alison's best friend. She lives with them in their apartment while visiting for work. Helena is from an upper class family. She is responsible for getting Alison to leave Jimmy. She and Jimmy then begin an affair. Her sense of morality leads her to leave. She can be considered the play's moral compass. Colonel Redfern Colonel Redfern is Alison's father. He represents Britain's great Edwardian past. He was a military leader in India for many years before returning with his family to England. He is critical of Jimmy and Alison's relationship, but accepts that he is to blame for many of their problems because of his meddling in their affairs. Look Back in Anger Themes | GradeSaver Look Back in Anger Themes Buy Study Guide The Angry Young Man Osborne's play was the first to explore the theme of the "Angry Young Man." This term describes a generation of post-World War II artists and working class men who generally ascribed to leftist, sometimes anarchist, politics and social views.

According to cultural critics, these young men were not a part of any organized movement but were, instead, individuals angry at a post-Victorian Britain that refused to acknowledge their social and class alienation. Jimmy Porter is often considered to be literature's seminal example of the angry young man. Jimmy is angry at the social and political structures that he believes has kept him from achieving his dreams and aspirations. He directs this anger towards his friends and, most notably, his wife Alison. The Kitchen Sink Drama Kitchen Sink drama is a term used to denote plays that rely on realism to explore domestic social relations. Realism, in British theater, was first experimented with in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by such playwrights as George Bernard Shaw. This genre attempted to capture the lives of the British upper class in a way that realistically reflected the ordinary drama of ruling class British society. According to many critics, by the mid-twentieth century the genre of realism had become tired and unimaginative. Osborne's play returned imagination to the Realist genre by capturing the anger and immediacy of post-war youth culture and the alienation that resulted in the British working classes. Look Back in Anger was able to comment on a range of domestic social dilemmas in this time period.

Most importantly, it was able to capture, through the character of Jimmy Porter, the anger of this generation that festered just below the surface of elite British culture. Loss of Childhood A theme that impacts the characters of Jimmy and Alison Porter is the idea of a lost childhood. Osborne uses specific examples -- the death of Jimmy's father when Jimmy was only ten, and how he was forced to watch the physical and mental demise of the man -- to demonstrate the way in which Jimmy is forced to deal with suffering from an early age. Alison's loss of childhood is best seen in the way that she was forced to grow up too fast by marrying Jimmy. Her youth is wasted in the anger and abuse that her husband levels upon her. Osborne suggests that a generation of British youth has experienced this same loss of childhood innocence. Osborne uses the examples of World War, the development of the atomic bomb, and the decline of the British Empire to show how an entire culture has lost the innocence that other generations were able to maintain. Real Life In the play, Jimmy Porter is consumed with the desire to live a more real and full life. He compares this burning desire to the empty actions and attitudes of others.

At first, he generalizes this emptiness by criticizing the lax writing and opinions of those in the newspapers. He then turns his angry gaze to those around him and close to him, Alison, Helena, and Cliff. Osborne's argument in the play for a real life is one in which men are allowed to feel a full range of emotions. The most real of these emotions is anger and Jimmy believes that this anger is his way of truly living. This idea was unique in British theater during the play's original run. Osborne argued in essays and criticisms that, until his play, British theater had subsumed the emotions of characters rendering them less realistic. Jimmy's desire for a real life is an attempt to restore raw emotion to the theater. Sloth in British Culture Jimmy Porter compares his quest for a more vibrant and emotional life to the slothfulness of the world around him. It is important to note that Jimmy does not see the world around him as dead, but merely asleep in some fundamental way. This is a fine line that Osborne walks throughout the play. Jimmy never argues that there is a nihilism within British culture. Instead, he sees a kind of slothfulness of character.

His anger is an attempt to awaken those around him from this cultural sleep. This slothfulness of emotion is best seen in the relationship between Alison and Cliff. Alison describes her relationship with Cliff as "comfortable." They are physically and emotionally affectionate with each other, but neither seems to want to take their passion to another level of intimacy. In this way, their relationship is lazy. They cannot awaken enough passion to consummate their affair. Jimmy seems to subconsciously understand this, which is the reason he is not jealous of their affection towards one another. The Rise and Fall of the British Empire The character of Colonel Redfern , Alison's father, represents the decline of and nostalgia for the British Empire. The Colonel had been stationed for many years in India, a symbol of Britain's imperial reach into the world. The Edwardian age which corresponded to Britain's height of power, had been the happiest of his life. His nostalgia is representative of the denial that Osborne sees in the psyche of the British people. The world has moved on into an American age, he argues, and the people of the nation cannot understand why they are no longer the world's greatest power.

Masculinity in Art Osborne has been accused by critics of misogynistic views in his plays. Many point to Look Back in Anger as the chief example. These critics accuse Osborne of glorifying young male anger and cruelty towards women and homosexuals. This is seen in the play in specific examples in which Jimmy Porter emotionally distresses Alison, his wife, and delivers a grisly monologue in which he wishes for Alison's mother's death. Osborne, however, asserts that he is attempting to restore a vision of true masculinity into a twentieth century culture that he sees as becoming increasingly feminized. This feminization is seen in the way that British culture shows an "indifference to anything but immediate, personal suffering." This causes a deadness within which Jimmy's visceral anger and masculine emotion is a retaliation against. Look Back in Anger Essay - Critical Essays - eNotes.com Look Back in Anger Essay - Critical Essays link Link Look Back in Anger established John Osborne as the leader and prototype of the so-called Angry Young Men, a group of British playwrights and novelists of the 1950’s who shared leftist or even anarchic political views and wrote to express their disillusionment with the status quo.

Although Look Back in Anger is not as unconventional or original as it initially appeared to be—its popular and critical success must be attributed in part to the fact that it appeared after one of the dullest decades in British theater—it is nevertheless of more than merely historical importance. Osborne’s greatest strengths are in dialogue and characterization. Except for entrances, exits, and an occasional kiss, slap, or scuffle, there is little physical action in Look Back in Anger. Instead, the real drama is found in the verbal interplay between the characters. It is also interesting that in this play, as is generally true of Osborne’s works, there is only one character with a real gift for language. Cliff and Alison, who are both at the mercy of Jimmy’s sharper wit, feel they can fight back only by refusing to respond to his insults. Helena at first exhibits some cleverness, but once Jimmy has chained her to the bed and the ironing board, she simply works at being a good audience for him. It has been noted that the most dramatic, and indeed the most hilarious, segments of Look Back in Anger are Jimmy’s monologues.

This is, of course, consistent with the fact that Look Back in Anger is essentially a one-character play—something that is also true of Osborne’s best-known later works, The Entertainer (pr., pb. 1957) and Luther (pr., pb. 1961). Osborne himself had not intended Look Back in Anger to be centered only on Jimmy. Colonel Redfern is a complex character, not nearly as obtuse as Jimmy suggests, and Helena, who at first appears to be the villain of the piece, develops into a rather fascinating individual by the end of the play. Interestingly, it is not Jimmy but Alison who, according to Osborne’s stage directions, is the most complicated of the three characters onstage at the beginning of the play. The fact remains, however, that Jimmy upstages everyone else because of his verbal brilliance. Osborne’s theory and his practice are at odds in Look Back in Anger. The play is generally classified as a protest play, one that voices the anger of working-class men at having willingly fought Great Britain’s wars only to return to a caste-conscious society that denied them opportunity, advancement, and even an acknowledgment of their dignity.

Although the classless society that Osborne advocated could easily find room for weaker souls like Cliff or the suggestible Alison, it would have no place for a Jimmy Porter, who would refuse or be unable to suppress his insistent self for the common good. Moreover, the play does not end with the triumph of the revolution or even with a useful martyrdom. If Jimmy Porter’s wife has been brought into the working-class camp, that has been accomplished not by him but by life; only because life has brought Alison pain, loss, and the experience of death does it become possible for her to empathize with her husband and, by implication, to surrender to his enormous ego. When the two are reconciled, they return to the fantasy world of their honeymoon; playing bear and squirrel, they retreat from the world. This is a far cry from the joint plans for social action that could be expected from a protest playwright. Whatever its deficiencies or its inconsistencies, however, Look Back in Anger delighted contemporary audiences, who, like the playwright himself, saw the play as a comedy. If Osborne is to be faulted for writing a play with much talk and little commitment, one must applaud him for creating at least one unforgettable character and for bringing new energy to the British theater.

Start Free Trial Start your free trial with eNotes to access more than 30,000 study guides. Get help with any book. Look Back in Anger | Why So Angry? Look Back in Anger by cgottinger When looking at the ‘ Angry Young Men ‘ movement it is important to look at the play that the term was inspired by. “Look Back in Anger” was written by John Osborne in 1956 and summed up what it was like to live in England in the 1950’s (Gilleman, 104). The main character Jimmy Porter became the voice of the new generation of working class British citizens who were angered by the persistent class distinctions in British society. In the early 1950’s British theatre was obsessed with “its own stagnation in grip of middle class mediocrity” but Osbornes play promoted the acceptance of what would become ‘kitchen sink’ realism (Gilleman, 107). “Look Back in Anger” encouraged young playwrights to demonstrate the harsh realism of the working class, the kind of play that would not have appealed to mainstream audiences a decade before.

Some examples of such plays include “A Taste of Honey” by Shelagh Delaney (1958), Chicken Soup with Barely (1958) and The Kitchen (1959) by Arnold Weskers (Gilleman, 108). All these plays dealt with the struggle of the lower classes and were set in dismal places to show the realistic life of the working class. The Play “Look Back in Anger” shows the love triangle between Jimmy Porter, who is a well educated man from the working class, his wife Alison who is from the upper class and her bestfriend. Usually the antihero of these ‘kitchen sink’ dramas were often well educated due to the idea of the “scholarship boy” in post-war Britain. Scholarship boys were individuals from the working class who tried to use education to climb the class ladder. By attending grammar schools and then later university, it often left the individual feeling alienated as they were disconnected from their class and were unable to blend into middle class despite their education (Schlüssel, 384). Increased intellegence yielded a greater sense of class consciousness causing resentment towards British society.

Most specifically the lack of social mobility and the failure of the welfare legislation policies that had once looked promising for the working class. As a result “the hopes raised in ‘45 remained largely unfulfilled, and the mental apathy of the working classes continued to be their distinctive feature”(Schlüssel, 384). This resentment in post-war Britain in turn fostered the “Angry Young Men” movement of the 50’s. Jimmy Porter in “Look Back in Anger” is an example of a ‘scholarship boy’ because although he was able to leave the lower class by marrying a woman from the middle class he was still unable to gain access to the middle class due to the stimga associated with the lower class. His education left him feeling insecure as he was unable to be integrated within middle class culture and he was still emotionally rooted in the lower class. He took his resentment out on his wife and her family as in his eyes her family stood for everything that was wrong with society (Schlüssel, 395).

For example in Act III Scene II as told in Schlüssel’s article Jimmy says to his wife Alison: “In order to relax, you’ve got to sweat your guts out. And, as far as you were concerned, you’d never had a hair out of place, or a bead of sweat anywhere” (Schlüssel, 395). “Look Back in Anger” was extremely successful due to its ability to realistically communicate the grievances of the working class and its revelancy to British society in the post-war era. The play was adapted into a film in 1956 and here is the trailer: Other playwrights and novelists along with Osborne such as Harold Pinter and Alan Sillitoe were determined to “puncture upper and middle class pretensions and write honestly about social, economic and sexual aspirations” (Hewison, 2). These writiers aimed at writing material that went against convention and attacked continued class differences, the stiff neck of the upper class and those against social change (Schlüssel, 385). These writers had a left wing stand against the established British social order and were concerned with changing that.

Although Pinter’s play “The Homecoming” is an absurdist play it has themes associated with the “Angry Young Men” movement as Pinter himself is considered to be a ‘kitchen sink’ realist (Hewison,44). To begin with the play has a lot of violence among the family members which speaks to the ‘Angry Young Men’ movement as well as “kitchen sink” realism as it is an accurate A production of “The Homecoming” dipiction of a family dynamic that does not fit the stereotyped British fundamental ideals of a polite civilized patriarch family. There is no real construction of a typical family which comments on the absurdity associated with the such ideals. Also the idea of the “Angel in the House” that is so closely linked with the British idea of family is questioned here. Ruth shows no desire in being a parent and is ready to leave her husband and children in order to become a live in prostitute and place holder for the family’s missing matriarch. Her husband Teddy is rather unphased by the whole deal and is willing to let his wife stay while he returns back to America to take care of the children: “If you like the idea I don’t mind.

We can manage very easily at home… until you come back.” (Pinter, 761). Teddy realizes the false illusion of such typical British ideals and is therefore able to abandon them by letting his wife stay. In a sense he alienates himself from his family in England by returning the America without his wife. Ruth sees the agreement as a sort of business exchange and is easily able to abandon the ‘ideal family’: “I would naturally want to draw up an inventory of everything I would need, which would require your signature in the presence of witnesses” (Pinter, 762). The ‘Angel in the House’ was an ideal of behaviour that people were expected to follow as it exemplified a family norm that was specifically British. A woman’s purpose was to serve her husband and take care of the children, but what Pinter does in “The Homecoming” is unmasks that stereotypical British family and shows that the British family dynamic is much different. Pinter questions social norms and comments on the absurdity of the long established British ideals and is therefore an example of the ‘Angry Young Men’ movement.

“The Homecoming” was also adapted into a movie in 1973, futher showing the impact the ‘Angry Young Men’ movement had on a variety of different mediums. Here is a scene from “The Homecoming” that shows Ruth’s violence and control, which is less obvious then Lenny’s but still as powerful: In my next entry I will be talking about The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe. Works Cited Gilleman, Luc. “From Coward and Rattigan to Osborne: Or the Enduring Importance of “Look Back in Anger.” Modern Drama 51.1 (2008): 104-125. EBSCO Host. Web. 21 March 2013. Hewison, Robert. “All the Rage.” New Statesman 135.4776 (2006): 44-46. EBSCO Host. Web. 20 Mar 2013. Humphreys, Sara. “The Absurd & Art, Truth, Politics.” Trent University . Oshawa. 25 Feb. 2013. Lecture. Pinter, Harold.

“The Homecoming.” The Broadview Anthology of British Literature The Twentieth Century and Beyond. Ed. Don LePan. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2006. Print. Schlüssel, Angelika. “Making a Political Statement or Refusing to Grow Up—Reflections on the Situation of the Academic Youth in Postwar British Literature.” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 65.4 (2005): 381-403. EBSCO Host. Web. 21 Mar 2013. Share this: Look Back in Anger by John Osborne - World Socialist Web Site World Socialist Web Site Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) Look Back in Anger by John Osborne Playing at the Royal National Theatre, London through September 18 By Paul Bond 14 September 1999 The first production of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956 provoked a major controversy. There were those, like the Observer newspaper's influential critic Kenneth Tynan, who saw it as the first totally original play of a new generation. There were others who hated both it and the world that Osborne was showing them.

But even these critics acknowledged that the play, written in just one month, marked a new voice on the British stage. Howard Brenton, writing in the Independent newspaper at the time of Osborne's death in 1994, said, “When somebody breaks the mould so comprehensively it's difficult to describe what it feels like”. In the same paper, Arnold Wesker described Osborne as having “opened the doors of theatres for all the succeeding generations of writers”. Look Back in Anger came to exemplify a reaction to the affected drawing-room comedies of Noel Coward, Terrence Rattigan and others, which dominated the West End stage in the early 1950s. Coward et al wrote about an affluent bourgeoisie at play in the drawing rooms of their country homes, or sections of the upper middle class comfortable in suburbia. Osborne and the writers who followed him were looking at the working class or the lower middle class, struggling with their existence in bedsits or terraces. The "kitchen sink" dramatists—as their style of domestic realism became to be known—sought to convey the language of everyday speech, and to shock with its bluntness.

Eric Keown, reviewing Look Back in Anger in Punch magazine at the time, wrote that Osborne “draws liberally on the vocabulary of the intestines and laces his tirades with the steamier epithets of the tripe butcher”. The play The three-act play takes place in a one-bedroom flat in the Midlands. Jimmy Porter, lower middle-class, university-educated, lives with his wife Alison, the daughter of a retired Colonel in the British Army in India. His friend Cliff Lewis, who helps Jimmy run a sweet stall, lives with them. Jimmy, intellectually restless and thwarted, reads the papers, argues and taunts his friends over their acceptance of the world around them. He rages to the point of violence, reserving much of his bile for Alison's friends and family. The situation is exacerbated by the arrival of Helena, an actress friend of Alison's from school. Appalled at what she finds, Helena calls Alison's father to take her away from the flat. He arrives while Jimmy is visiting the mother of a friend and takes Alison away. As soon as she has gone, Helena moves in with Jimmy. Alison returns to visit, having lost Jimmy's baby. Helena can no longer stand living with Jimmy and leaves.

Finally Alison returns to Jimmy and his angry life. The problem, which even a fine revival like this production has, is with the melodramatic qualities of the narrative. Osborne's script became almost a template for the new school of writers, and it is difficult to present his work without being aware that there is a faint whiff of formula about it. But despite the plot's shortcomings (which were recognised even by such a fierce admirer as Tynan), it still has the power to startle. There was an audible intake of breath from the audience when Jimmy fell into Helena's arms. Thanks to a fine performance from William Gaunt the sympathy felt by Colonel Redfern, Alison's father, for Jimmy came as a revelation, but still totally understandable within the framework of the play. The language, too, still has the power to shock, such as when Jimmy, unaware of Alison's pregnancy, says to her: “If only something—something would happen to you, and wake you out of your beauty sleep! If you could have a child, and it would die. Let it grow, let a recognisable human face emerge from that little mass of India rubber and wrinkles. Please—if only I could watch you face that.

I wonder if you might even become a recognisable human being yourself. But I doubt it.” It is a tribute to Gregory Hersov's direction and Michael Sheen's performance as Jimmy that this does not seem overblown or ridiculous. Some of the imagery and language doesn't travel too well historically and reflects only the preoccupations of the era. It is difficult, for example, to imagine jazz being quite as exotic as it is for Jimmy. Or to understand the intellectual courage of saying about a gay man, “He's like a man with a strawberry mark—he keeps thrusting it in your face because he can't believe it doesn't interest or horrify you particularly. As if I give a damn which way he likes his meat served up”. At the time homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. The production stays close to Osborne's original stage-image. This enables it to show the play as standing at a crossroads both of the British stage and also of political and historical epochs. Before the show, the title is projected onto the curtains like a jazz album cover. Between scenes, wreaths of cigarette smoke rise up the curtains. An era is evoked.

Matilda Ziegler's Helena also captures a lost period of weekly repertory theatre, of companies travelling the country with precisely the sort of play that Look Back in Anger was attacking; a world evoked with such nostalgia in The Dresser. It was a time when actors auditioned in suits or the sort of starched twin-pieces that Helena wears before she moves in with Jimmy. The admiration of William Gaunt's Colonel Redfern for Jimmy's principles and his amusement at Jimmy's description of Mrs Redfern as “an overfed, overprivileged old bitch”, are set against his total lack of comprehension of what Jimmy's life actually means. Alison says to him “You're hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. And neither of you can face it. Something's gone wrong somewhere, hasn't it?” Or as it was put in a Daily Express article from December 1959 which is quoted in the programme: “Out of this decade has come the Illusion of Comfort, and we have lost the sense of life's difficulty”. It is clear from Osborne's script that there was no lack of a sense of life's difficulties around at the time.

But the emphasis had shifted from the martyred expressions of the British ruling class and their “white man's burden”, as represented in Colonel Redfern, to a more serious appraisal of life for those outside that ruling class. Emma Fielding does a good job playing Alison, who has grown up with the one attitude but has been forced by her situation into the other. Fielding gives a good performance as the woman who tolerates Jimmy's invective, living constantly with the threat of something erupting in front of her. Helena on the other hand ultimately cannot stay with Jimmy precisely because of the destruction of all her old certainties. Perhaps the only truly sympathetic character in the play is Cliff, here excellently played by Jason Hughes. From his role as Jimmy's foil in the early exchanges, to appearing as Alison's real friend, to the point when he decides that he does not want to stay in the flat, Hughes gives a magnificent portrayal of solidness. Whilst Alison is forced to accept Jimmy's rages because her family background has robbed her of any other viable option, Hughes shows us Cliff as someone who is keeping the peace by hiding his real character—by playing along with all the games.

In Jimmy Porter, Osborne created what came to be seen as a model of the “angry young man”—railing at the lack of passion of his age, entreating Alison and Cliff to show some enthusiasm. He is marvellously, unreasonably idealistic in a wildly unfocussed way. Kenneth Tynan, who described Jimmy as “the completest young pup in our literature since Hamlet”, criticised those who attacked the recklessness of Jimmy's attacks. “Is Jimmy's anger justified? Why doesn't he do something? These questions might be relevant if the character had failed to come to life; in the presence of such evident and blazing vitality, I marvel at the pedantry that could ask them. Why don't Chekhov's people do something? Is the sun justified in scorching us?” It is just this “evident and blazing vitality” that Michael Sheen represents so well. Spluttering with indignation, retreating into his pseudo-literary takes on vaudeville, firing off his vindictive gags almost because he can do nothing else. Osborne, throughout his work, was fascinated by end-of-pier music hall and vaudeville.

In The Entertainer, one year later, he used vaudeville and its washed-up performer Archie Rice in a brilliant take on the crisis in post-war British society. Here he has Jimmy and Cliff perform a variety-style number, “Don't be afraid to sleep with your sweetheart just because she's better than you”, as well as trading cheap cracks in true hackneyed music hall style. More than any other writer of his generation, Osborne was fascinated by the tragedy lurking at the heart of the light entertainment performance. Michael Sheen adds another layer to this in his spluttering soliloquies, carrying with them an echo of Tony Hancock's ridiculous suburban pretensions. It is a fascinating comparison: Hancock, the parodist of lower-middle-class aspirations, and Jimmy Porter, the raging expression of the frustrations of the lower middle class. Sheen has a lightness of touch that suits Jimmy's failed jokes and misplaced comments, as well as his more furious denunciations of the absence of passion. The impact Osborne had on British theatre is incalculable. With Look Back in Anger he brought class as an issue before British audiences.

Under Hersov's direction, Sheen articulates the realisation of a man who has reached the limits of the possibilities open to him but is struggling to retain his dignity. “Why don't we have a little game?” he asks. “Let's pretend that we're human beings, and that we're actually alive”. Sheen gives a marvellous performance of a man running in circles trying to find a way out. Osborne has often been criticised for not seeing a way out, and not explaining more carefully the crisis in which Jimmy finds himself. Robert Wright, reviewing the first production in the Star, wrote “He obviously wants to shake us into thinking but we are never quite clear what it is he wants us to think about. Is it the Class Struggle or simply sex?” This incoherence in Jimmy's rage is both strength and a limitation to the play. It is apparent from the text that Osborne recognised this limitation, even tacitly. Helena criticises Jimmy, saying, “There's no place for people like that any longer—in sex, or politics, or anything. That's why he's so futile.... He doesn't know where he is, or where he's going.

He'll never do anything, and he'll never amount to anything.” It seems almost a recognition that within his own work there are insufficient answers. This goes hand-in-hand with Jimmy's statement that “people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer.... There aren't any good, brave causes left.” Such a statement could be read as the voice of pessimistic nihilism. Writing about Celine's novel Journey to the End of Night, Trotsky described it as “a book dictated by terror in the face of life, and weariness of it, rather than by indignation. Active indignation is linked up with hope. In Celine's book there is no hope.” That is clearly not the case here. Jimmy yearns for passion, and clings to the idea of it. When Alison returns to him he tells her “I may be a lost cause, but I thought if you loved me, it needn't matter.” There is a vision, however confused, of the possibilities of human existence. What makes Jimmy's statement so interesting is precisely the historical context in which it occurs.

Kenneth Tynan, who referred to the play's “instinctive leftishness” in his Observer review, wrote in a piece on “The Angry Young Movement” that Jimmy Porter “represented the dismay of many young Britons ... who came of age under a Socialist government, yet found, when they went out into the world, that the class system was still mysteriously intact.” It is the mistaken association of the post-war Labour government with the failure of socialism per se that accounts for Porter's frustration. Osborne, active in various protests at the time, such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, articulated his own sentiments through his lead character. In this respect, it is possible to see in the play expressions of the political impasse that had been reached in Britain during the 1950s, as a result of the domination of intellectual life by Stalinism and social democracy. Nonetheless, it is also possible to see a challenge, albeit confused and unclear, to that impasse. There remains somewhere at the play's core, even if it cannot be explained, hope. There remains a belief that somehow people can survive the worst and perhaps even overcome it; a belief in humanity, and the possibility of a way forward.

(All quotations from Kenneth Tynan are from Tynan on Theatre, Penguin, 1964.) Look Back in Anger by John Osborne Author John Osborne John Osborne John James Osborne (12 December 1929 - 24 December 1994) was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor and critic of the Establishment. The success of his 1956 play Look Back in Anger transformed English theatre. In a productive life of more than 40 years, Osborne explored many themes and genres, writing for stage, film and TV. His personal life was extravagant and iconoclastic. He was notorious for the ornate violence of his language, not only on behalf of the political causes he supported but also against his own family, including his wives and children. Osborne was one of the first writers to address Britain's purpose in the post-imperial age. He was the first to question the point of the monarchy on a prominent public stage. During his peak (1956 - 1966), he helped make contempt an acceptable and now even cliched onstage emotion, argued for the cleansing wisdom of bad behaviour and bad taste, and combined unsparing truthfulness with devastating wit.

JOHN OSBORNE'S BRUSH WITH HAVANT On 12 December 1950, John Osborne spent his 21st birthday in Havant Magistrate's Court. Long before Jimmy Porter was conceived, and at a time when the huge success of his birth was still unimaginable, Osborne was a struggling actor with an eye to running his own theatre company. The dream had been realised earlier that year when he and some chums rented the Victoria Hall, a 300-seater auditorium attached to a hotel in Beach Road, Hayling Island - since demolished. With a programme of potboilers and classics out of copyright the company had quite a good summer but with the end of the holiday season, the bank account soon emptied. A local grocer, one Mr. Cherry, took Osborne to court over an unpaid bill of 14 pounds. The actors lost the case and did a runner. Vengeance on Mr. Cherry took the form of characterising him as the mean-minded killjoy, Percy Elliot in Osborne's early play, 'Epitaph for George Dillon'. But final retribution did not stop there.

In 1950, Havant Magistrate's Court was a tiny structure behind Havant Police Station in West Street. Twenty years later both of these buildings stood empty when the borough built their current replacements. They mouldered away for a bit until the council took note of a new amateur theatre group in town called Theatre Union. This nomadic group needed a home and the old Magistrate's Court, at a peppercorn rent, was the answer. In 1970, Theatre Union moved in. With a canny sense of history, they called their new base the Bench Theatre. In time, the company gave way to the inevitable and dropped the Theatre Union moniker in favour of the name of the building. For the young company, John Osborne and his generation of playwrights stood for everything they aspired to, so it was not long before they turned to his plays for a production. In December 1972, as Osborne celebrated his 42nd birthday, the Bench staged his 1957 play, 'The Entertainer'. Archie Rice was played by Ray Osborne, a founder member. He was not related to the playwright, but that was not going to stop him writing to his famous namesake.

Knowing the story of Mr. Cherry and the unpaid bill, Ray thought Osborne would like to know that the whirly-gig of time had brought in its revenges. The result was two happy Osborne. The famous one wrote back to our Osborne with a letter full of charm, only slightly tinged with malice. As the playwright's usual mix in writing letters was the other way we can only count this as a rare event. The Bench moved out of the old building in 1977 when the Old Town Hall was developed as the arts centre it is today. The magistrate's court and the police station have since been demolished. Sadly, Ray Osborne died in 1985, leaving an enormous bundle of Bench stuff to me. Over the following months I converted 'stuff' into 'archive' and have been cataloguing the Bench's fortunes ever since. But though Ray had told me the story - okay, more than once - I never found Osborne's letter. I imagine that it was so precious to him that he put it in a special place - where perhaps it still is.

David Penrose PlayLook Back in Anger In a one room flat in the Midlands, this is a slice of life drama set in the 1950's representing post-war youth with the lead character, protagonist Jimmy Porter, an intelligent and educated but disaffected young man of working class origin living with his upper middle class wife, Alison. Cliff shares their lodging house and attempts to keep the peace during Jimmy's constant vitriolic verbal attacks on his wife, her family and their social standing. Their marriage is further threatened by the arrival of Alison's friend and aspiring actress Helena...... This play is considered to be autobiographical relating to John Osborne's relationship with the actress Pamela Lane, the adoration of his father and the vehement hatred of his mother. The Merits of Look Back in Anger When written, in the 1950's, this was the most original piece ever written which ultimately changed the face of British Theatre.

As the first 'kitchen sink drama' featuring the foremost 'angry young man' in Jimmy Porter, it inspired a new wave of writers, directors and film makers who, as a direct result, produced classics such as 'Room at the Top', 'Saturday Night, Sunday Morning' and 'Love on the Dole'. Of a 1989 revival of Look Back in Anger, Michael Billington, critic for the Guardian, asserted that "Good plays change their meaning with time; and it is a measure of the quality of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger that it now seems a very different work to the one staged at the Royal Court in 1956." Although to Billington the play "seemed less an incendiary social drama than an exploration of personal pain," he went on to note that "what is slightly chilling is to realise how topical many of Osborne's ideas remain." The plain, drab setting of the play illustrates the contrast between the idealistic Jimmy and the dull reality of the world surrounding him. Reviews The NewsJennie Rawling Jimmy Porter, the lead character in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, is a character most audiences find difficult to like.

Showing this week at the Spring in Havant, Bench Theatre's production boasts a perfectly unlikeable Jimmy, played by Mark Woodhouse. His slightly hunched posture and threatening presence create an air of unease, with Jimmy's volatile nature played with gusto. In moments where he allows himself to really live in the character, the actor is capable of delivering a powerful performance. Porter's long-suffering wife Alison is played with sensitivity and a very human subtleness by Robin Hall. Liz Donnelly as Alison's friend, Helena Charles, and Pete Woodward as Alison's father, Colonel Redfern, give distinct performances, with lovely work on the characters' physicality. Live music from trumpet player Jonathan Brocklehurst is a treat, with a well-deserved bow at the end. Sam Treharne as the Porters' neighbour, Cliff Lewis, gives a standout performance. The subtlest of facial expressions or body language tells the story of not only his character's feelings but the whole situation. His touching performance binds the show together. A thoughtful and emotive performance that doesn't always hit the mark but is powerful when it does. Until Saturday.

The News, Jennie Rawling, 19th September 2013 Daily Echo, SouthamptonHam Quentin Look Back in Anger Summary - eNotes.com Look Back in Anger Summary Homework Help Look Back in Anger Summary In John Osborne's play, Look Back in Anger, the overeducated and underemployed Jimmy Porter rails against his work and life. He often lashes out at his wife, Alison, who he sees as uppity. Jimmy's anger and frustration lead Alison to move back in with her father, but by the end of the play, they manage to reconcile. Jimmy runs a little candy shop with his friend Cliff Lewis. He's dissatisfied with this job and feels that he deserves more out of life. His anger causes his wife Alison to leave him, at the urging of her friend Helena. Helena and Jimmy get into a fight when Alison leaves, but it turns into passion, and they stay together as a couple for several months. Alison, who has miscarried, comes back to the house. Helena, feeling guilty, reconciles with Alison and leaves Jimmy. Alison and Jimmy seem to be back together at the end of the play.

link Link Look Back in Anger opens on a lazy, mid-1950’s Sunday afternoon in a one-room attic apartment in a town in the English Midlands. As usual, Jimmy Porter and his friend and business partner, Cliff Lewis, are reading the Sunday papers while Jimmy’s wife, Alison, irons. As usual, Jimmy is verbally bashing everyone and everything around him, including Cliff and Alison—who seem to take his anger in stride. What makes Jimmy so angry? To support a political reading of Look Back in Anger, critics cite Jimmy’s famous speech near the end of the play, “there aren’t any good, brave causes left,” suggesting that Jimmy’s anger comes from his disappointment that the faded Edwardian glory of England can no longer be real and felt with conviction and enthusiasm. This interpretation is supported by an earlier passage in the play in which Jimmy is quite nostalgic about the Edwardian world of Alison’s father, Colonel Redfern: “all home-made cakes and croquet, bright ideas, bright uniforms . . .

what a romantic picture.” Jimmy admits that “if you’ve no world of your own, it’s rather pleasant to regret the passing of someone else’s.” In his contemporary England, Jimmy sees only political decay and the pretense of continued health. As an intelligent, articulate, and educated twenty-five-year-old, Jimmy has not been able to find work that matches his skills, so he earns a meager living running a street-corner candy stand with Cliff as his partner. Part of him reaches for more success, symbolized most eloquently in his frequent, offstage riffs on his jazz trumpet, but part of him mistrusts success because he does not trust aspiration in a country where aspiration is associated with all that is false and hollow. From his demeaning social position, Jimmy lashes out at all the self-important people around him. His anger strikes at everything associated with British bureaucracy, but, unhappily, it also overflows into mistreatment of his wife and his friend Cliff. A more psychological and domestic interpretation of the play often points to Jimmy’s pain over his father’s death. When Jimmy was ten years old, he spent a year watching his father die.

To him, the rest of the family did not seem to care, and Jimmy sees a similar lack of sensitivity in Alison. He calls her “Lady Pusillanimous” (meaning cowardly), a “monument to non-attachment,” and in one of his verbal tirades even wishes that some catastrophe would shock her out of her lethargy, even something horrible such as having a child die. This is indeed what happens, and that tragedy serves, ironically, as the reconciling force in their marriage. There are other interpretations of Jimmy’s anger, but his complexity derives from the fact that the precise cause of his discontent remains elusive. In fact, audiences and critics find Jimmy compelling because the richness of his pain defies final analysis. Jimmy’s anger cools a little at the end of the play but only because his conflict with Alison is resolved at a very great price. When Alison discovers that she is pregnant, an old friend, Helena Charles, comes to stay with the Porters, and Jimmy’s badgering intensifies; his harassment is eventually directed toward Helena. In reaction, Helena convinces Alison that she should leave Jimmy and live again with her father, and Alison leaves.

At the end of act 2, however, Helena is drawn by some strange attraction to Jimmy and offers herself to him, becoming his mistress. When act 3 begins, it is Sunday afternoon again and Jimmy and Cliff are once more reading their Sunday papers. Now, however, in a mirror image of the opening of the play, Helena has replaced Alison at the ironing board. Both the resolution of the conflict and the end of the play come as Alison returns, having lost both the baby and her fertility. In a scene that some critics find insufficiently motivated, Helena leaves and gives Jimmy back to Alison. The play ends with Jimmy and Alison reconciling, in part because Jimmy is satisfied that Alison’s pain has brought her more in tune with his own suffering. The reconciliation is richly ambiguous. Have Jimmy and Alison repaired a marriage worth saving, or have they simply hid from problems they cannot face and handle? The enduring quality of Look Back in Anger is that either of these readings, and more, can be defended. More Content: Summary (hide) link Link On a Sunday evening in April, Jimmy Porter and Cliff Lewis, both working-class men, and Jimmy’s upper-class wife, Alison, are in the attic flat they share.

Music is playing on the radio, and while Alison irons, Jimmy and Cliff read the newspapers. From time to time, Jimmy makes acid comments on what he is reading, orders the other two to minister to his needs, or points out Cliff’s defects, in particular his ignorance and his ineffectuality. Jimmy’s worst venom is reserved for his wife, who he says is as vacuous as her mother and father and, like them, incapable of thought. Cliff defends Alison, and she treats him with sisterly affection, pressing his trousers and giving him cigarettes, despite the fact that the doctor and Jimmy have forbidden him to smoke. Furious because Cliff and Alison refuse to fight with him, Jimmy contrasts their lethargy with the energy of his former mistress, Madeline, and of Webster, a gay friend of Alison. He then returns to his verbal attacks on Alison, her family, and her gender, claiming that women’s worst vice is that they are noisy. Increasingly annoyed with both Alison and Cliff, Jimmy turns off the radio, contending that with Alison ironing and Cliff turning the pages of his newspaper, it is impossible to hear the music.

Cliff finally insists that Jimmy apologize to them both, and in the resulting scuffle, the ironing board is knocked down and Alison is burned. Angry at last, she tells Jimmy to leave. He walks out of the room, and while Cliff is treating her injury, she confides in him. She is miserable, she says, and even though she is pregnant, she is seriously considering leaving Jimmy. Jimmy comes back into the room and apologizes to Alison, attempting to explain his behavior as a reaction against his feeling that he is trapped by his love for her; he also acknowledges an abiding anger because Alison has never experienced the pain that he has and cannot understand him. Alison is then called to the telephone downstairs. She returns to report that she has invited an actor friend, Helena Charles, who has just come to town, to stay with them for a few days until she finds a place to live. Two weeks later, Helena has established herself in the household, and, as Cliff commented, the tension has mounted. It is true that by doing most of the cooking Helena is a great help to Alison; however, she makes no secret of her dislike for Jimmy.

She pressures Alison to take immediate action about her situation, either by telling Jimmy about her pregnancy and demanding that he become a responsible member of society or by leaving him and returning to her parents. Jimmy makes no secret of his hatred for Helena, and after Alison announces that she is going to church with her friend, Jimmy draws the battle lines. Helena and he are fighting for Alison, he says, and he is determined to win. Without Alison’s knowledge, however, Helena has already sent a telegram to Alison’s father, Colonel Redfern, telling him that his daughter needs him. Somewhat uncertainly, Alison says that she will go home with her father. She does not tell Jimmy of her plans, but when he is summoned to the deathbed of his best friend’s mother and begs Alison to accompany him, she coldly refuses and walks out, followed by Helena, who is accompanying her to church. When Colonel Redfern appears at the Porter apartment the next afternoon, Jimmy has not returned. In his conversation with Alison, her father shows considerable sympathy for Jimmy, even commenting that Alison seems to have learned a lot from him. He also suggests that Alison’s mother has wronged Jimmy by hiring detectives to find some way to discredit or destroy him.

Alison has made her decision, however. In response to Cliff’s question as to who will break the news of her departure to her husband, she hands him a letter for Jimmy. Indicating that he does not like to see anyone suffer, Cliff goes out to get something to eat and, he says, probably to have a few drinks. The colonel had assumed that Helena would be leaving along with Alison, but, as Cliff has predicted, Helena makes excuses and remains. When Jimmy appears, he is so furious because Alison has slighted the dying woman that he does not seem to care much about her having walked out on him. He is not even particularly affected by Helena’s revelation that Alison is pregnant. Helena slaps him, but when Jimmy collapses with grief, she kisses him and pulls him into an embrace. Several months later, Helena is doing the ironing, sweetly approving of everything Jimmy does and says. She tells Jimmy that she does not intend to go to church, and Jimmy exults at having led her into a state of sin. Cliff, who does not like Helena and obviously misses Alison, is planning to move out.

Cliff and Jimmy, both in a good humor, make up a vaudeville skit, which, as usual, ends in a tussle. Helena tells Jimmy that she loves him, and, although he does not respond in kind, he is tender and affectionate toward her, even offering to take her out on the town. Unexpectedly, Alison arrives, looking extremely unwell. Jimmy refuses to speak to his wife and leaves the room. When they are alone, the women confide in each other. Helena tells Alison that her affair with Jimmy is finished and that she intends to leave him. Alison tells Helena that she lost her baby and cannot have another. Concerned about Jimmy, Alison urges Helena to remain with him, but Helena reiterates her opinion that all is over between the two of them, in part because they are so different and in part because she cannot overcome her feelings of guilt. The women argue as to which of them, if either, Jimmy really needs. When Jimmy comes back into the room, Helena tells him of her decision. Angrily, he sweeps her possessions off the dresser and thrusts them into her arms, and she goes downstairs to pack.

Still angry about Alison’s indifference to the death of his friend’s mother, Jimmy tells Alison how disappointed he has been in her, and she collapses on the floor, begging his forgiveness. In losing the baby, she says, she has at last experienced the pain of living and so can be what he wants her to be. Tenderly, Jimmy comforts her, and, clinging together, the two promise that from now on they will protect each other in a world that is inimical to love. Characterization of Jimmy in John Osborne's Play A Look Back in Anger | Kibin Characterization of Jimmy in John Osborne's Play A Look Back in Anger Sign Up & Access Essays Already a member? Login here Pages: 3 This preview is partially blurred. Sign up to view the full document. Sign Up & Access Essays Already a member? Login here End of preview Upgrade to view the full document This is an unformatted preview.

Sign up to view the full document End of preview Upgrade to view the full document The play A Look Back in Anger by John Osborne brings the notion of the angry man gone mad to the surface But what does this play teach us Or does this play teach us anything At the end of this paper it will be evident that this play does teach us something and that is how some people as individuals have their own ways of thinking and reacting which are considerably different from the social norms Of course the character we will be analyzing is Jimmy There are 3 stimuli that correspond to radical reactions by Jimmy The first stimulus is love Jimmy has ways of expressing his love to the women of his life that are different than the rest of societys The second stimulus is the natural aggression towards threats and most of these threats are small that Jimmy expresses with Cliff and also in Allisons mother in particular The final trigger to Jimmys radical way of reacting is that of death It seems to be an image that haunts him throughout the play and he only brings it to the surface after the halfway point This last stimuli can be regarded as an explanation to his radical ways that give him the image of the angry man However there is one over-ruling thesis that covers all three stimuli that is the basis of Jimmys radical behavior

 and that is of women in general Jimmy as will be demonstrated in each section is very insecure with the opposite sex whether it is will girlfriends wives or landlordsOn the topic of love Jimmy has demonstrated his difficulty to conform to the social norms in terms of being a gentleman towards women especially his own wife Allison The first major indication of this problem was when Allison and him were showing their first mutual signs of affection but they were required to result to role playing to fulfill their show of love Jimmy Youre @Kibin is a lifesaver for my essay right now!!

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Question: What is the name of the main character in John Osborne's 'Look Back In Anger'?
Answer: Jimmy Porter